


A World of Good

by Aramley



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-23
Updated: 2011-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-27 21:26:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aramley/pseuds/Aramley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>On being released from Sarratt, Peter disregarded Toby on two fronts: he didn't go to the country, and he didn't find himself a girl.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	A World of Good

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lately](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lately/gifts).



> 1\. In TTSS book canon, Peter Guillam ran networks of agents in former French North Africa in the mid-60s, referred to as a 'murderous' assignment, literally: Peter's networks were blown, his agents killed, and he was forced to return to England. For the nefarious purposes of this fic I've set the date at 1967.
> 
> 2\. The [Sexual Offences Act of 1967](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Offences_Act_1967) notionally legalised homosexuality in England and Wales, though in practice the law required both consenting parties to be over the age of 21 and for the act to be conducted in a private place, with the definition of 'private place' subject to interpretation (e.g. hotel rooms were not deemed private). Leo Abse MP and Lord Arran were the main impetus to the law's passing.

"A rest, I think, is what you need," said Toby Esterhase.

Peter ignored the remark in favour of continuing to stare out of the window at Sarratt's grounds, green and alien to him now under a thin English sun.

"A rest, yes," said Toby, speaking to displace the silence that had settled into the plain room with its bare off-white walls, uncarpeted floorboards, and the table with its chipped formica top that separated Toby from Peter. Toby's driving gloves - really, Peter thought, absently, more bloody English than the English themselves - lay primly to one side, while Toby's neat hands made out a cheque. Peter kicked the infirm table-leg lightly, more out of boredom than malicious intent, but Toby swore in _sotto voce_ Hungarian and cast Peter a dark look, blotting ink with his thumb.

"One month, I think, will make a world of good," he said, capping his fountain pen with a little irritable click. He slid the cheque across the table. "This account is still active, yes? I think it is. It will do you good, Peter," he went on, referring either to the rest or the money, such as it was; the Circus was not disposed to deal generously with failure.

"If I were you I would go to the country," Toby was saying now, pushing back his chair with an unpleasant scraping noise across the boards. "Or I would get a girl. Enjoy yourself. Don't think of unpleasant things."

But Peter noted that he had not been ordered to forget, and beyond that they both knew that their profession was one of remembering.

"Goodbye, Peter," Toby said, at the door.

Watching Toby leave, Peter was suddenly seized with a fear that he might never see him again, might never know for sure. "Is it true what they said, that none of them got out?" he called, words tumbling over each other.

Toby's small white face might almost have been called impassive, but for the downward aspect of his mouth and the obscure sadness of his eyes.

"It is very hard," he said. "No, Peter, I am sorry. They were all of them hanged."

-

On being released from Sarratt, Peter disregarded Toby on two fronts: he didn't go to the country, and he didn't find himself a girl.

-

The party was held in a spacious Chelsea flat on a fashionable street that belonged to an old university friend, John, whom Peter had met again by chance a few days after his return from the isolation of Sarratt. Peter had accepted the invitation and the address pressed into his hand mostly to cut the chance meeting short, and hadn't intended to go to the party at all.

He had gone to his mother's house in Surrey meaning to stay there a few days, which would have afforded him a convenient excuse. In the end he left after a single night. His mother had recently remarried after a widowhood too brief for her neighbours' tastes, and she imagined that Peter felt disdainful because he, too, had missed the occasion, and there could be no explaining that he had been too scheming for his life to make time for her brief registry wedding and reception at the Prince of Wales lounge bar. As a matter of fact he did dislike the second husband, when he thought about him at all. He was too small to trouble the spaces that Peter's father had left behind in the old house, which the family had owned and lived in since Peter was born, and where Peter met his own ghost at every turn and woke from nightmares of heat and and unseen terror to the walls of his childhood room, his pillow wet with tears he didn't remember shedding.

Professional instinct told him it had been a mistake to come to the party within a few minutes of arriving, though he was instantly taken under John's wing as a particular friend, a superior whiskey pressed into his hand before he was led around with John's clammy hand under his elbow through the several large yet too-crowded rooms of John's flat to be introduced to a carousel of youngish, quite drunk strangers, none of whom seemed to have any profession to speak of save Richard the schoolmaster, with whom Peter found himself cast adrift as John finally whirled away into another group of guests.

Richard the schoolmaster was situated conveniently near an open window; it was a warm evening in late August and yet the little air that stirred through the window was better than the stuffy air of the overcrowded flat. He was not attractive exactly, but pleasant to look at; older than Peter, though probably not much more than a few years. Sensibly dressed, though he'd gone so far as to remove his tie.

He smiled politely and began to make small talk. "You and John are old friends?"

"We were at school together, and university," said Peter. "How do you -?"

"Oh, we have mutual friends," said Richard. He shifted closer to the window and Peter, to be heard better over the noise of conversation and a distant record player that was losing the competition with its listeners. "And what is it that you do now?"

"This and that," said Peter, lightly. He took a sip of the whiskey while Richard watched him with softly amused brown eyes, waiting with a teacher's patience for a better answer. "I'm a bit of a journalist."

Richard laughed, softly. "Only a bit of one?"

"A very little bit," Peter said, with a smile which he knew looked open and engaging.

"John said that you were something mysterious abroad," said Richard, unexpectedly. With long practice, Peter laughed.

"There's no mystery in a jobbing reporter crawling around every dusty corner of the world," he said. "You teach, I think?"

"For my sins," said Richard, with a disarming half-shrug.

"And what is it that you teach?"

"Oh, just plain old English," said Richard, with easy self-deprecation. He added, "But I cover French sometimes, when the master is out."

"Ah," said Peter, before he could stop himself. "You speak French?"

"Mais oui," said Richard, smiling. His accent had the crisp edges of the born Englishman; it was French that had been learned but not lived in. "Do you know it?"

"My father was French," said Peter, and gave his surname with the proper French inflection, reflecting absently that Richard must be a very successful schoolmaster, and would probably make a very good spy - there was something about him that inspired honesty.

" _Peter_ ," John said, very drunk, suddenly wheeling into the orbit of their conversation. His arm was thrown over the shoulders of a younger man, flushed and fresh-faced as a teenager. Other men trailed behind them. "Enjoying yourself?"

"Yes, of course," said Peter. He raised his full glass to John in a toast. "Thanks for inviting me."

"Of course, of course," said John, clapping his free hand to Peter's shoulder. His hands were clammy. "All friends here, my dear man, _if_ you know what I mean."

The men around him clearly knew what he meant, and a laugh went through the loose semicircle they'd formed as if they were passing it between them.

"Yes, three cheers for Leo Abse," said one man, who Peter hadn't yet been introduced to and hoped to God he wasn't about to be.

"Hang all of them, I don't believe in the House of Commons," said another. "I'm a Party member."

From the back of the group: "Which party?"

"The only party in town," said the first man, laughing. "The one that wants to paint the town _red_."

Oh, for Christ's sake, thought Peter. He kept his expression calm out of long practice, seething inwardly. His fingers tightened on the tumbler. You stupid, stupid bloody fool, Guillam.

He became aware, suddenly, of every pair of eyes in the room. Anonymous men, but half of them with Civil Service striped through like the message in Brighton rock. Richard had shifted to the periphery of the circle, and Peter was aware of his dark eyes, watching.

He had an image of the greats of the fifth floor arrayed around him. Bill Haydon, perhaps, would be amused. _Queers not enough, Peter, you've got to pick up Bolshies, too?_ Toby Esterhase, darkly furious. Smiley cleaning his glasses, his air of fatherly disappointment counterpoint to Control, who sat with the barely-leashed wrath of God boiling around him like thunderclouds.

"Excuse me," he said, seized with a panicky urge to get out, now, at any cost. The conversation went on without missing a beat and the circle expanded to absorb his absence, someone else edging in to hang on the every inane word being exchanged, and Peter thought that he might be able to slip away mostly unobserved and, with luck and a bit more alcohol, mostly unremembered.

"You're leaving?" Peter turned to find the schoolteacher, Richard, hovering in the doorway to the flat.

Peter didn't bother to make any pretence of regret. He continued to shrug into his jacket. "Yes, I'm afraid so."

Richard leaned against the doorframe. His crooked smile managed to be both pleasant and knowing. "Was it the politics or the other thing?"

His look inspired in Peter the very unaccustomed urge to explain himself. "A bit of both," Peter confessed. "Look, don't think I - I mean to say - "

"It's alright," said Richard. "It's a thrill to them, you know, the danger. Of course, it must be a thrill when you have little to lose by it."

 _Not like us_ , was the unspoken sentiment. Peter tried not to balk at the attempt to draw them into a conspiracy of two.

"Right," he said, offhandedly. He gave a distant, polite smile. "Well, pleasure meeting you, Richard."

"Pleasure, yes," Richard said. He stepped forward and reached out to shake Peter's hand, and it was only when Peter took it that he realised there was a slip of paper between their palms. He flinched back, but Richard's surprisingly strong grip held him. Peter could have broken the grip - could have broken Richard's hand, arm, neck, before he ever cried out - but something stilled him.

"Look," Richard said, when he was satisfied that Peter wouldn't wrench out of his grasp. "They might not, but I understand. _You_ know. I can be discreet. I like you, Peter. I think, well, I think we could help each other."

Released, Peter closed the scrap of paper into a fist.

"It's only a telephone number," Richard said. In his face there was something fresh, like hope.

-

The flat the Circus had found for him was neat and empty, small but larger than the one he'd given up before leaving England for warmer climes. It was that more than anything else which made him realise that he had been grounded, that here he was expected to stay. That for a blown agent-runner like him there were no more adventures greater than the vicarious.

The furnishings were serviceable, luxurious compared to what he had been used to. He thought of his rooms in Algiers, with the heat sweating out of the walls and the rusting fan that worked only intermittently and complained noisily at being asked to do so. His shaving kit would still be sitting on the shelf over the grimy wash-basin, his second suit in the wardrobe. The noise of the children from the flat below would be coming through the window that never properly shut. Here, in London, the glazed windows kept out most of the genteel noise of cars, the neighbors were too well-bred to make nuisances of themselves, and the flat was still and silent, silent, silent.

-

He was not stupid enough to use the flat's phone line. There was a public telephone box at the end of the street and he slipped into it as brazenly as he dared, dialling the number with steady hands. The streets were quiet. For a small job like this the lamplighters might send only one watcher, parked on an adjacent street, perhaps two passes in different clothes; but the faces of the few people who passed the phone box while the operator connected the call were unfamiliar and always different.

"Hello?" came Richard's voice down the line.

"Oh, hello," said Peter. "It's - it's Peter Guillam."

"Peter," said Richard, in a carefully restrained voice that seemed to be attempting to conceal some rush of pleasure, and Peter inferred that he was not alone on the other end of the line. He would have suspected a wife, but hadn't noted a wedding band or the conspicuous absence of one on Richard's hand. "Yes, hello."

"I've been thinking about your offer," said Peter, adopting a brusque official tone. "Perhaps we could make an appointment to go over it in more depth?"

His own voice made him want to cringe, but it was mirrored in Richard's as he replied, "Yes, I think that would be best."

"If it's convenient, we can meet at yours," said Peter.

"Oh, no," said Richard. "I'm afraid the boarding house won't be quite suitable."

Peter hesitated. "No, of course. Well, you can - you should come here, then."

"Let me get a pen," said Richard, simply enough, but there was a smile in its cadence that made Peter's heart constrict, with fear and with something else too delicate to name.

-

His hand was trembling, Peter saw, with a kind of detached shock. The spoon rattled against the sides of the mug as he stirred the tea, exactly the sort of tell-tale that he'd thought trained out of himself long ago. Breathe, he thought sharply, as severe on personal faults as he would be to professional ones.

In the living room off the kitchenette, Richard strolled casually around the flat and paused to inspect a print on the wall.

"You like Constable?" he said, as Peter came through with the tea.

Peter looked at the print's soft impressionistic colours. He'd scissored it carefully from a magazine that morning; it hid a small hole in the wall from Peter's paranoiac sweep for listening devices. "Is that what that is?"

Richard laughed appreciatively and took his tea. There was a loose set to his shoulders that made him seem more at ease in Peter's flat than Peter himself.

"You've not lived here long, then," he said, with a look around at Peter's scant furniture and few posessions.

"You know what they say about rolling stones," said Peter. The coffee cup was burning his fingers and he looked down at his fingers turning it round and round in his hands, delicately finding the cool places at the rim.

"Is that what you are?" Richard's look was oddly shrewd. In the few encounters of this kind Peter had endured before, transience and wilful ignorance had been the order.

"It's what I've been," said Peter, with equally unaccustomed honesty.

Richard smiled and Peter felt the warmth of his approval, like a schoolboy who'd given a particularly pleasing answer.

"Not any more then," Richard said.

Peter hesitated a moment. "Not any more, no."

Of necessity, he'd become a good judge of truth. When Richard levelled him an even look, saying, "Well, good," Peter was certain he meant it. They barely knew each other, and what little Richard knew of Peter was cobbled together from lie and half-truth and evasion. What Peter knew was nothing more than honesty and professional intuition could tell. It took a good agent to know that caution kept you alive. It took a better one to understand that sometimes survival could hinge on a single act of recklessness.

Peter wanted to survive. He wanted to live. He stepped closer, tea forgotten, closing the bare space between them. Richard watched him, clear and unflinching, and Peter thought that there were all sorts of bravery in the world. He kissed Richard once, brief and almost chaste, the heart he'd spent a long time pretending he didn't have thudding in his chest.

Richard smiled and brought his free hand up to touch the line of Peter's cheekbone with soft, sure fingers.

"You want taking care of," he said, gently. From another man it might have been unbearable - an innuendo - but not from Richard. Richard leaned in and kissed him again. Peter closed his eyes.

-

Afterwards they lay pressed together and dozing in Peter's narrow bed, decadent laziness with the late afternoon sunlight seaming the drawn curtains. Richard's hands carded Peter's hair loosely, over and over in a lulling motion. Peter couldn't recall the last time he'd received such a simple physical kindness. The thought came to him, an imperative as strong as if it had come to him fully-formed through some external force: _I will keep this._

Peter pressed Richard's wrist. "Don't go to John's parties any more."

His heart had been in his throat when he asked it; it was hardly his right. But the line of Richard's mouth softened, the set of his shoulders, as though he were relieved to be asked. He covered Peter's hand with his own, resting his fingers over Peter's.

"I won't," he promised. "I'm all yours, if you want me."


End file.
